Tipperary players open up how they used to be 'ashamed' to show face in public

Irish Daily Mirror

20-07-2025

Last summer Jason Forde and Jake Morris felt 'ashamed' to walk down the streets of their home town.
Today they walked up the Hogan Stand as All-Ireland champions.
If anything sums up sport's peaks and valleys, it's this, how a team who couldn't buy a win in 2024 learned how to defy the odds time after time in 2025.
And yet their celebrations come with an asterisk, a reminder that while this end point is incredible, the starting point last summer was bitter.
Forde says: 'We obviously live in such a mad, hurling county and a lot of us are living close to the big towns.
'So, when you're going out and about, you're meeting people. Like, I remember meeting Jack Morris a couple of weeks after our season ended last summer and he was like, "you're nearly ashamed going around to show your face" because of the manner in which we went out.' Tipperary Liam Cahill celebrates after the game with Jason Forde
Morris and Forde were not the only ones who felt that way.
For defender Michael Breen, the hardship preceded the glory, as he recalls: 'Twelve months ago, we were walking down the street and kind of ducking and diving from people because you don't want to have conversations.
'And all it took for us to recover from that was an acceptance that we needed to get back into the trenches. We had to get the work done. Like we knew where we were last year, put it that way.'
Where they were was in a bad place; so they spent the winter honing their fitness and then the spring picking up results.
By the time summer arrived, they survived a defeat to Cork and then went into the game when their season turned - knocking All-Ireland champions Clare out.
Forde says: 'In that Clare game, the Tipp crowd came out and cheered us off the bus. We were starting to reconnect with the support.
'Then there is the fact that going down to Ennis is a really tough place to visit, as it was the home of the All-Ireland Champions.
'That game was in the melting pot with five minutes to go but a couple of big scores from Eoghan Connolly and Seán Keneally and a few others kind of got us over the line.
'And I think after that game we could see that the team was starting to open up, that we knew once we got a result against Waterford that we would qualify out of Munster. That was the big game.'
But yesterday's game was even bigger, of course, a microcosm of their last 12 months.
Again there was hardship - a six-point deficit at the break - and again there was fighting spirit, as they stormed out of the blocks at the start of the second half, scoring 3-14 to Cork's 0-2 in the second period.
And for Forde it means so much to have won a third All-Ireland, after winning titles in 2016 and 2019.
He said: 'After last season finished, you were meeting people and they were asking why bother going back. Some were nearly writing you off, suggesting that you were finished.
'I met Liam (Cahill, the Tipp manager) and I just said 'we couldn't leave things like that, the year that we had'. Having played for Tipp for 13 seasons, to leave it on that note wouldn't have felt right.
'And you could see the younger players that were coming. And when I met Liam you got a really good sense that there was going to be no stone left unturned to get the team back.
'There was nobody talking about winning All-Irelands. The question was whether we could get a bit of pride back in the jersey, get out of Munster and maybe reconnect with the Tipperary supporters. The fact we did that makes this win a bit sweeter.'
It was a victory that stemmed from weeks of hardship building their fitness and then moments of magic building a second-half lead.
As well as that, it was also a tactical victory for Cahill, who revised his 'traditionalist' approach to the game and played with a sweeper.
He had to.
In the semi-final, Cork put seven goals past Dublin. Yesterday they managed just one, Tipp denying them the space they crave.
Cahill said: 'I suppose the dog on the street knew that you just can't leave channels for this Cork team to run through.
'Ah look, I'm a traditionalist, I like to play 15 on 15 if I can at all. But we had to cut our cloth to measure to make sure that we gave ourselves a chance.
'You know, Brian O'Mara was superb. Like, he's such a good hurler; so comfortable in the role today.
'We stopped a lot of that real hard aggressive running from Cork and that was a real platform for us to go on then and counter-attack hard and get it into the boys inside.'
Yet at times in the first half he wondered if he should return to his preferred strategy when they were hitting a high number of wides.
He said: 'I did wonder if we should just abandon (the sweeper) and go at it and see what will happen?' But at the start of the second half, we got a bit of oxygen and we kicked on from there.
'I suppose when you get to a final, you have to try and win it.'
And they did that. Glory is theirs, the shame belonging to the past.